New York City

Photo of a gathering of Episcopal leaders outside St. John the Divine Cathedral.

Rt. Rev. Allen K. Shin outside New York's Cathedral of St. John the Divine / Cathedral archives

Rt. Rev. Allen K. Shin is the bishop suffragan for the Episcopal Diocese of New York. This excerpt is from a speech Shin delivered in New York City on March 23 following the killing of eight people, six of them women of Asian ancestry, in Atlanta.

“WHEN THE PANDEMIC began, it didn’t take long for the anti-Asian violence to begin. The violence of calling the virus ‘China virus’ and ‘kung flu’ by the highest political office holder of this nation only helped stoke the fire and put fuel on the hatred against Asians.

I have been called racist epithets many times before. I have been told to go back home many times before. But never have I felt fearful for my life as I have during this pandemic of hatred and violence against Asians. While the overall crime rate has declined from 2019 to 2020, hate crimes against Asians have increased nearly 150 percent in [16] major U.S. cities—and 68 percent of the victims have been Asian women.

In this Chloe Wise painting, a man is hugging and touching the hand of a person with sterility gloves and purrell hand sanitizer..

Tormentedly Untainted, 2019, by Chloe Wise

A FEW WEEKS ago, a friend invited me to New York with them to see some art. After taking the commuter train down from New Haven, Conn., we made our way through Grand Central Station, onto the subway, then up a steep escalator, eventually arriving at the gallery’s entrance.

Visiting Manhattan during a pandemic is a fascinating study in strangeness. The Times Square subway station is so quiet you can hear your own footsteps. Sweaty players duel on a basketball court, and I am shocked by seeing unmasked faces in public. Even the experience of gallery hopping, one that used to be extremely familiar to me, feels askew. A few of the places we visit require a signed liability waiver before entering. Each desk is punctuated by a giant bottle of hand sanitizer. This imposing combination does not stop me from enjoying the work I see, however. There are many juxtapositions of color and line that sparkle in my brain. An image of a fabric store, itself made out of fabric, proves especially delightful. I see some art books that I think I might like to have in my home. I am glad to have gone.

Patrick Henry 3-24-2021
Illustration of peace activism Dan Berrigan's face. He is wearing a golf cap and behind him is the New York City skyline with a red ribbon for AIDS awareness.

Illustrations by Ryan Inzana

The well-known peace activist spent much of his life bringing comfort to the dying.

Faith-Marie Zamblé 12-01-2020
Detail from Luciano Garbati’s sculpture called "Medusa With the Head of Perseus." A golden arm and hand of Medusa holds the head of Perseus by his curly hair.

Detail from Luciano Garbati’s Medusa With the Head of Perseus / Jeenah Moon / The New York Times / Redux

IN THE GREEK mythology I was taught as a child, a recurring plot always struck me as deeply unfair. A god seduces—or rapes—a mortal woman, who either succumbs to the coercion or tries to resist. If she resists, she is punished. If she gives in, a jealous goddess punishes her.

The fact that my classmates and I had to read these myths without being encouraged to deconstruct them still disturbs me. My desire is not to sanitize art nor neuter its political incorrectness, but rather to see people (especially children) realize their agency as readers, particularly in instances where misogyny should be questioned. Which is why the installation of Luciano Garbati’s sculpture Medusa With the Head of Perseus in New York City represents a delightful inversion.

As the story goes, Medusa was a beautiful young woman, unfairly punished for being a victim of Poseidon’s lust. Because the rape takes place in Athena’s temple, Athena, believing her sanctuary defiled, turns Medusa into a monster. Medusa, now with snakes for hair, is so hideous that she can transform anyone who beholds her to stone. Perseus, a demigod himself, is tasked with killing Medusa, a duty he executes via beheading. A 16th-century bronze by Benvenuto Cellini, titled Perseus With the Head of Medusa, depicts Perseus in his moment of triumph. He holds Medusa’s head aloft while snakes emerge from her neck.

Alexander Jusdanis 6-22-2020

Photo by Andy Mai on Unsplash

Karen decided to leave monastic life. She found a rent-free cabin a few hours away in Colt Run Holler, W.Va. She moved in with just $100 and an old Ford Bronco. Alone in the woods, she became a hermit.

Rachel Sherman 12-09-2019

Call it an American melting pot – or pozole, a traditional Mexican soup, or cioppino, an Italian-American fisherman’s stew – Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church in the Belmont neighborhood of the Bronx welcomes worshippers from more than a dozen nations.

Bill McKibben 4-25-2018

I HAD A REAL New York City sojourn on a recent weekend, one that reminded this longtime country dweller how sweet the city can be.

It began on Friday night at the IFC Center downtown, watching a premiere screening of the pilot of the new HBO series The Deuce, which is set on 42nd Street in 1971. Though I didn’t get to New York until the early ’80s, the street scenes in the show were familiar—the grit and violence and general decay lingered at least through the crack years of the mid-1980s; when I left New York, 42nd Street remained a canyon of porn theaters and massage parlors. (The Deuce, by the way, is brilliant—Maggie Gyllenhaal is unforgettable as the complicated lead.)

the Web Editors 1-11-2018

Image via Sojourners

Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents detained immigrant rights activist Ravi Ragbir on Thursday after a routine check-in in New York City. Ragbir is the executive director of the New Sanctuary Coalition of New York and has been nationally recognized for his work.

Image via RNS/Reuters/Carlos Barria

The two major streams of Christian engagement on war are pacifism and just war theory, which comes out of Catholic social teaching. The pacifist response to Syria strikes is clearly opposed. As for the just war analysis, it takes a little explaining, but reaches the same conclusion.

the Web Editors 3-23-2017

The suspect, James Harris Jackson, told police he traveled to New York with the intent to attack black men, according to the New York Times. The Times quoted Assistant Chief William Aubry describing Jackson as having "harbored a hatred of black men for more than a decade." Officials have expressed desire to classify the charge to a hate crime.

Image via RNS/Creative Commons

The neighborhood has long been home to numerous historic and not-so-historic houses of worship of nearly every size and type. Here you can find congregations of Muslims, Hebrew Israelites, AMEs, Baptists, Presbyterians, Pentecostals, and everything else in between.

So who cares if a few churches have to be razed to make Harlem “great again,” right?

I do.

the Web Editors 12-05-2016

Image via a katz/Shutterstock.com

The Injustice Boycott has selected three locations that it plans to affect: New York City, San Francisco, and Standing Rock. The initiative will give the government leaders of those locations until Jan. 17, the day after Martin Luther King Jr. Day, to answer to the demands of local activists and organizers, and if those demands aren’t answered by that day, the Injustice Boycott will launch several actions against the city. These actions will include a tourism boycott of those cities; pulling money out of banks, financial institutions, and large corporations that either support racial injustice and police brutality in those cities or have not come out against them; and protests in the city that will be designed to shut down the work of businesses and city government.

Da’Shawn Mosley 11-10-2016

Image via Joseph Gruber/Shutterstock.com

Stop telling me to fight. Stop saying on your social media platforms, and in your blogs and your op-eds, that everyone should dust themselves off and get up and fix this. Stop saying that addressing this issue is everyone’s duty, because I can’t even begin to explain to you how far from the truth such a statement is.

But I’ll try. I will overcome my exhaustion and explain this to you as clearly as I can, and you can thank me later, if you’re so inclined. Let it be known that I like Edible Arrangements.

Image via /Shutterstock.com

The incident seems like a straightforward hate crime: Swastikas sprayed in and around the New Jersey home of an Indian-American running for Congress earlier this month.

But the vandalism is steeped in religious and ethnic irony.

9-19-2016

Image via RNS/Reuters/Eric Miller

A man who wounded eight people in a knife attack at a mall in central Minnesota before he was shot dead by an off-duty police officer is a “soldier of theIslamic State,” the militant group’s news agency said.

The man, who was wearing a private security uniform, made references to Allah and asked at least one person if they were Muslim before he assaulted them at the Crossroads Center mall in St. Cloud on Sept. 17, the city’s Police Chief William Blair Anderson told reporters.

Reuters was not immediately able to verify the authenticity of the claim made byIslamic State through the group’s affiliated Amaq news agency.

the Web Editors 9-14-2016

Image via miker/Shutterstock.com

"When we allow one faith community to be targets then we open the doors for others to be targeted. I believe the worst is yet to come unless more people actively intervene with their voices, their votes, and in public acts of solidarity with their Muslim neighbors."

Hours after parishioners celebrated Easter, which fell on May 1 in the Orthodox community, a fire gutted their landmark Manhattan cathedral.

“Our church has burned down last night,” read the announcement the next day on the website of the Serbian Orthodox Cathedral of St. Sava.

Photo via Alliance Defending Freedom / RNS

Church members hold signs during a 2013 rally in the Bronx. Photo via Alliance Defending Freedom / RNS

Congregations in New York City that rent space in public schools will be able to hold Easter services this Sunday despite a ruling on March 30 by the U.S. Supreme Court rejecting an appeal from an evangelical church in the Bronx that sought to overturn a ban on after-hours worship services at public schools.

A spokesman for Mayor Bill de Blasio also said that the mayor would work to ensure that houses of worship could continue to rent space like any other group.

“Now that litigation has concluded, the city will develop rules of the road that respect the rights of both religious groups and nonparticipants,” Wiley Norvell said in response to the ruling.

“While we review and revise the rules, groups currently permitted to use schools for worship will continue to be able to worship on school premises.”

Pastor Robert Hall of the Bronx Household of Faith, which was the plaintiff in the case, said he was cautiously optimistic after the administration’s response.

“We are gratified that he is allowing the churches to stay,” Hall told The New York Times.

Mourners attend the funeral for seven children killed in a Brooklyn fire in New

Mourners attend the funeral for seven children killed in a Brooklyn fire in New York on March 22. Image via RNS/Reuters.

The bodies of seven children from an Orthodox Jewish family who died in a fire in their home in Brooklyn have arrived in Israel for burial, Israeli network Arutz Sheva, and The Associated Press reported March 23.

Funeral services for the four boys and three girls of the Sassoon family, ages 5 to 16, were held in Brooklyn on March 22, before their bodies were flown to Israel.

The family lived in Jerusalem, where the children are to be buried, before moving to the Midwood neighborhood of Brooklyn two years ago. A friend said the family had planned to return to Israel to live.

Authorities identified the victims as girls Eliane, 16; Rivkah, 11; and Sara, 6; and boys David, 12; Yeshua, 10; Moshe, 8; and Yaakob, 5. All were found in upstairs bedrooms of the two-story, brick-and-wood, single-family home after the blaze — the city’s deadliest fire since 2007 — was reported early March 21.

Their 45-year-old mother, Gayle, a Brooklyn native, and 14-year-old sister, Tzipara, who jumped from a second-story window, remained in critical condition.

Rick Hampson 3-03-2015
Photo via Robert Deutsch / USA Today / RNS

St. Thomas More church in New York City. Photo via Robert Deutsch / USA Today / RNS

Our Lady of Vilnius Church, built by families of immigrant Lithuanian longshoremen, started out a century ago as a beloved worship space. Now, it’s a coveted real estate asset.

In 2013, six years after the church was closed, it was sold for $13 million to one of the city’s biggest developers. The following year, that company flipped it like a pancake to another developer for $18.4 million.

Now the yellow brick church near the entrance to the Holland Tunnel awaits demolition to make way for an 18-story luxury apartment house.

“It makes you cynical,” says Christina Nakraseive, a former parishioner who supported the legal case against the church closing until it was rejected by the state’s highest court. “It seems like it’s all about real estate.”

The issue has taken on added significance since the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York, citing declining attendance, rising costs, and a looming priest shortage, announced plans to merge scores of parishes and close dozens of churches this year.